How many companies in Turkey use AI?

This is a declaration of use. It shows that a company touches a technology, not that decisions are tied to that technology.

How much did the rate change in one year?

The rate was 7.5% in 2025 and reached 14% in 2026. It appears to have roughly doubled in one year.

Looking over a longer period, the trend becomes clearer. The same rate was 2.7% in 2021, meaning it has more than quintupled in five years.

The increase is real, but the baseline remains low. We are talking about fourteen out of a hundred companies.

How does usage vary by company size?

The difference is large. The rate is 12.8% for enterprises with 10-49 employees, 17.0% for those with 50-249 employees, and 37.1% for those with 250 or more employees.

In 2021, the same rates were 2.3%, 3.6%, and 9.6% respectively. The widest gap opened among large companies.

What comes with size is capacity before budget. In a large company, the infrastructure to collect, store, and approve data is already in place.

Which sectors lead?

AI usage is highest among enterprises in telecommunications, programming, and information technology activities: 63.7%. This is followed by publishing, radio-TV, and content at 57.1%, and repair of computers and communication equipment at 32.4%.

In the middle tier, finance and insurance stand at 30.2%, and real estate at 25.8%. At the bottom of the list are wholesale and retail trade at 12.7%, transportation and storage at 9.7%, and construction at 6.9%.

The common feature of the top sectors is that their product is already digital. In sectors with physical output, rates remain markedly lower.

A warning on comparison: in the 2025 bulletin, information and communication was reported as a single item at 47.1%. In the 2026 bulletin, this area is split into two, so the sector rankings across the two years cannot be compared directly.

Where do companies use AI?

Among enterprise users, the most common purpose is marketing or sales, at 51.0%. This is followed by research and development or innovation activities at 46.3%, and production or service processes at 43.4%.

The top of the ranking is the same as last year. Marketing and sales held first place in 2025 as well, at 46.5%.

Because respondents could select multiple options, the total exceeds 100%.

How do these tools enter companies?

Among enterprise users, 67.8% report preferring open-source software, while 49.1% prefer closed-source software.

On the development side, the breakdown is as follows: 46.5% of enterprises have external providers develop solutions, while 32.1% develop with their own employees.

The fact that external development leads internal development points in the same direction as the expertise findings in the next section.

What do non-using companies see as an obstacle?

The proportion of enterprises stating that they do not use AI but plan to do so is 8.3%. The most common obstacle cited by this group is the lack of relevant expertise within the enterprise: 72.3%.

This is followed by legal uncertainty regarding liability for AI-related damages at 66.4%, and concerns over data protection and privacy violations at 65.4%.

The shift in ranking is notable. In 2025, high costs stood in second place at 67.4%; cost does not appear in the top three for 2026.

Lack of expertise held first place for two consecutive years. It is no longer a finding that can be read as a single-year fluctuation.

What do these figures not say?

The study is based on self-declaration. A company states that it uses AI, and the survey records it.

Usage frequency, how many people it reaches, and whether it has passed the pilot stage are not measured separately in this indicator. A company could be using AI in three departments without tying any decisions to these tools.

The doubling of the rate in one year should also be understood within this limitation. The number of reporting companies increased; this data does not imply that every declaration carries the same depth of usage.

How a company can measure its own readiness is a separate topic, which can be found at [link to readiness text].

What did the rate reach among individuals?

The proportion of individuals declaring that they use generative AI is 37.6% in 2026. This rate was 19.2% in 2025.

By age group, the highest rate is among 16-24 year-olds at 64.9%. This is followed by 25-34 year-olds at 55.7%, and 35-44 year-olds at 38.1%.

The difference is even more pronounced by education level. The rate is 62.7% among higher education graduates, 45.4% among high school or vocational high school graduates, and 8.5% among primary school graduates.

Among users, 86.4% use it for personal purposes, 37.3% for professional purposes, and 32.6% for formal education. The gap between the company rate and the individual rate indicates that the tool enters daily life before entering the workplace.

Where do the figures come from?

The 2026 rates in this text are drawn from TURKSTAT's Artificial Intelligence Statistics bulletin dated October 2, 2026. The bulletin relies on two surveys.

Enterprise figures come from the Survey on Information and Communication Technology Usage in Enterprises and cover enterprises with ten or more employees. Data between 2021 and 2026 was used for comparison.

Individual figures come from the 2026 results of the Survey on Information and Communication Technology Usage in Households and cover the 16-74 age group.

The 2025 rates used for comparison are taken from TURKSTAT's bulletin dated October 1, 2025, issue number 57945.

This page is updated with every new bulletin. When figures become outdated, the text is updated rather than deleted.

Last updated: October 13, 2026